ModNation Racers Deep Dive

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Let your creative juices flow.

By Greg Miller

It was about halfway through my demo of ModNation Racers yesterday that I stopped listening. The developer was telling me all about the elaborate kart racer and how you can create your own drivers, cars and courses, race online with two players on the same system, have four-player split-screen matches and more. But when I figured out that I could feasibly create the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters, my ears shut down and I began running the possible shapes I could use to create the "no ghosts" logo.

That is the magic of ModNation Racers. It unleashes your creativity with a controller.

If you missed the debut of ModNation Racers back at E3 2009, think LittleBigPlanet mixed with Mario Kart. On the surface, this is a neat little kart racer where you drift around and draft behind opponents while picking up power-ups and vying to be No. 1. However, beneath that, you're going to fall in love with the tenets of LBP: play, create, share. You'll whip up your little racers based on the "urban vinyl" art style. You'll make your own cars with stickers, engines, and crazy bits such as wooden wheels and complete tracks with ramps and obstacles. The kicker is that you'll then upload all this stuff and share it with the world. Folks will download it and rate it while you do the same with their stuff. It's going to be rather epic if it all comes together. Think about what skilled creators are going to be able to do when they get their hands on these tools.

Must go faster.

Now, I'm not that talented of an artist on paper or on the TV screen, but I'll be damned if I didn't scurry home with my preview copy of the game, sit down, and crank out a pretty decent homage to the Ecto-1. True, the ambulance/hearse body I'd really need isn't in the game (or at least I haven't unlocked it yet) but with the game's simple but deep design suite, I was able to make a little white car with a red fin back that was obvious at first glance. For the logo, I had imagined a simple "no" symbol, but when I sat I cranked out a simple red circle-black circle-red line image, I began to dream bigger. Soon, I had the ghost's circle body, teardrop head, stars for hands, and so on. Before I knew it, I had a Ghostbusters logo I could be proud of.

Then, I created drivers for the University of Missouri mascot Truman the Tiger and a stylized Commissioner Gordon from Batman.

Who ya gonna call?

I know that I've written about how simple all this creation stuff has seemed in the past, but this was my first time getting to really tear into it on my own, and I was floored by how easy it was. Truman and Gordon weren't things I set out to create. I just sat down, started fooling with the tools, and before I knew it, I had these characters. Choosing skins, changing materials between rubber and cloth, and modifying outfits is a snap. When you put a suit and tie on a character and decide to edit the colors, the game bumps the colors that you're already using on your Mod racer and kart to the top of the pile so you can stick with the same scheme without trudging through menus. When you piece together a logo with multiple stickers like I did with the Ghostbusters one, you can go into the sticker tool, group all of those pieces together, and have an original sticker you can copy and paste wherever you like.